1 Race and the Problem of Pacifism in the United States
The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization dedicated to ending violence, was central to the nonviolent fight against Jim Crow. Founded in 1916 as the Great War wracked Western Europe and Jim Crow hardened into a violent way of life in the United States, the FOR believed that the segregation of Black and white people, like the isolating distance between the capital and laboring classes, was the root of widespread lynching in the United States. These American pacifists saw social isolation from one other, and the ignorance and enmity that resulted from such segregation, as the primary driver of racial violence in the United States. American racism and class conflict were analogs to the caustic nationalism fueling the bloodletting in Western Europe, and FOR leaders believed that meaningful engagement across lines of difference among people from different backgrounds could cure the U.S. of its scourge of lynching.
Over the course of its first three decades, the FOR intentionally entered violent conflicts to test a political âmethodâ steeped in the religious âprinciplesâ of Quaker pacifism with the goal of building interracial and cross-class alliances that proved violence was not the only way to solve seemingly intractable conflicts. Its work contributed directly to the process of imagining nonviolence in the United States, and later proved indispensable to local experiments with nonviolent direct action.1
But by themselves, the pacifist politics of noncooperationâthe refusal to fightâproved to be a threadbare response to the violence of lynching in the United States. As hundreds of thousands of Black Americans migrated from the southern countryside to cities across the United States during the First World War, they were routinely met with brutal mob violence. Self-defense was a common choice for Black families facing armed vigilantes, both in the South and along the trail of the Great Migration, and the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 made litigation a premier strategy in the fight against Jim Crow. For most Black people, religious or otherwise, pacifism was irrelevant at best and foolish at worst, and the philosophy of nonviolence that became so central to the Black freedom movement was neither a staple of Black thought in the early twentieth century nor a legible philosophy in the fight against Jim Crow.
The FOR launched a process of imagining nonviolenceâincluding experimentation with nonviolent direct actionâthat stretched over decades and contributed to the development of religious nonviolence as a political philosophy in the Black freedom struggle. The white southerner Howard Kester was at the leading edge of the FORâs effort to conceptualize and advance a constructive nonviolent force in the fight against Jim Crow in the 1920s and 1930s. He organized interracial southern groups around an âaggressive pacifismâ in the interwar era, but was fired by the FOR late in 1933 for organizing interracial groups of striking workers who kept and used guns for self-defense. To his white bosses in New York, the purity of a pacifist commitment to do no violence outweighed the importance of Kesterâs interracial organizing in the South.
The lily-white FOR ultimately failed to demonstrate the âpositiveâ nonviolent force it wrote about so often in the 1920s. But in the wake of Kesterâs firing, a cohort of Black intellectuals and organizers joined the FOR to serve in staff and leadership positionsâHoward Thurman, Bayard Rustin, and James Farmerâand the work of these men moved the FOR from idea to action in developing the nonviolent âsocial forceâ envisioned by the pacifists. Each was a pacifist upon joining the FOR, and each was committed to the project of joining personal ethical practice with effective nonviolent politics. As Black pacifists, they brought unique sensibilities and new networks to the FOR. And Thurmanâs ideas, in particular, contributed directly to imagining nonviolence as a practical and powerful force for Black Americans. The organizing acumen of Rustin and Farmer bolstered the FORâs fledgling effort to develop a political techniqueânonviolent direct actionâthat expressed the ethics of nonviolence.2
By the early 1940s, the FORâs effort to develop âtechniques which are themselves immediate endsâ began to bear fruit as the organization became the first in the United States to formally support and actively experiment with nonviolent political methods in what they called the âfield of race relations.â The FORâs work was foundational to imagining nonviolence as a politics of being, and the FORâs local organizing led to nonviolent direct-action campaigns in communities across the countryâa cornerstone in the foundation of the midcentury nonviolent revolt against Jim Crow.
Origins of the U.S. Fellowship
The Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded in Cambridge, England, one week after Germany and Russia declared war on each other in August 1914.3 The group came together after the publication of English Quaker Henry Hodgkinâs âMessage to Men and Women of Goodwill,â where Hodgkin declared, âWar spells the bankruptcy of much that we too lightly call Christian.â4 He implored his fellow Christians to find better methods than war to solve the worldâs major conflicts, and nearly seventy U.S. activists heeded his call at Garden City, Long Island, in early November 1916. These U.S. pacifists, previously âunknown to one anotherâ and emerging from âdifferent social groups and various faiths,â found themselves âdrawn together by a common feeling that the time was ripe for a deeper expression of the Christian message.â These founders belonged primarily to existing Christian peace organizationsâthe Student Christian Movement, the World Alliance of Churches for Promoting International Friendship, and the Womenâs International League for Peace and Freedom, among othersâbut they were joined in their belief that the newly organized Fellowship of Reconciliation offered the best chance to meet the âprofound need of uniting men and women of all nations.â5
Establishing an office in New York City in 1916, the FOR named Quaker Edward W. Evans as its first secretary and appointed Young Menâs Christian Association (YMCA) youth leader Gilbert A. Beaver to the General Affairs Committee. Helen S. Daley was appointed head of the Study Group Committee, and Haverford philosophy professor Rufus Jones was appointed to head the Conference Committee.6 While its charter commitment was a refusal to âtake part in war,â the FOR believed its charge âclearly involves ⌠very much more than the question of War.â Such conflicts are not an âisolated phenomenon,â the founders wrote, but are rather âone out of many unhappy consequences of the spiritual poverty of society.â Acknowledging âthe gulf between the present state of society and the ideal conceived,â FOR members stated in 1916 their belief that the âimmediate realization of that idealâ was possible by acting in a âspirit of loveâ in all aspects of oneâs âpersonal and social life.â7 This idea, that a social ideal might be realized through personal acts of love, became a hallmark of the FORâs approach and a core element of the politics of being, the animating impulse in the FORâs search for a method to transform the violence plaguing American life.
The FORâs primary orientation to social change was Christian. The organization called âthe life and teaching and death of Jesusâ a ârevolutionary principleâ and implored its small but growing membership to live like Jesus âhere and now, in every relationship,â across the spectrum of âpersonal, social, commercial, national, and international life.â8 FOR leaders believed it unnecessary to wait for social change, suggesting instead that such change would emerge from living in new ways here and now. FOR leaders believed their unique charge was to discover the âfull implicationsâ of applying this way of life âto all the great problems of industrial and social life,â and they sought the âdevelopment of local groupsâ to apply FOR principles to domestic conflicts in the United States. The FOR cited its tactics as âconversation,â âcorrespondence,â and âthe use of literature,â and said its goal was to âenlist and develop spiritual and intellectual leaders who can make special contributions to Christian thought and practice.â9
This almost exclusively white group of pacifists belonged to a much wider movement in the early twentieth century that sought to square Christian ideas with the scientific revolution and an emerging positivism. This shift in epistemology gave rise to a religious modernist movement that included intellectuals who placed the Bible in a historical context to explain its meaning. The FORâs claim that âthe life, death, and teachings of Jesusâ provide a ârevolutionary principleâ was part of a broader intellectual movement to understand the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth within the political and social context of first-century Palestine. A focus on what Albert Schweitzer called the âhistorical Jesusâ challenged the biblical literalism of fundamentalist Christians, who argued that the Bible was the direct and infallible word of God. This modern religious movement was buoyed by positivist notions of social perfectibility, a vision that informed the work of Social Gospel advocates like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden, among many others. These religious people and the thousands of others who preached the Social Gospel coordinated outreach programs that provided clothes, food, and health services for increasingly urban populations concentrated in subpar living conditions. Some of these religious leaders, seeking to bolster their ethical argument in favor of charity and outreach, suggested that socialist practices were clearly evident in the life of Jesus. In this Progressive Era moment, an epoch of âsuperabundant organizationsâ as associational life grew dramatically in the United States. The FOR staked out its claim as the âcentral organizationâ to facilitate the âgrowth of the Movementâ designed to bring together people of all classes and races in a âcommon questâ to apply the revolutionary and nonviolent principles of Jesus of Nazareth âto the problems of social and national and international life.â10
But the FOR struggled to move beyond its primary charge of opposing war, which it named as among the most acute problems in âsocial and international life.â âAs Christians we are forbidden to wage war,â the FORâs founders wrote in 1916, seeking instead to apply âthe broad and fundamental principles of Christianity to International Affairs.â11 For the vast majority of Black Americans, however, opposing war was neither a spiritual imperative nor an activist endeavor. American wars tended to produce significant advancement for African Americans. Crispus Attucks, a New England man of African descent, was a hero to many for being among the first patriots to die in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War.12 More than 200,000 Black troops fought for freedom on the side of the Union in the American Civil War, what Frederick Douglass called âan abolition warâ whose âcomprehensive and logical objectâ was ending slavery.13 At the turn of the twentieth century, more than 3,000 African Americans fought in the Spanish-American War in both Cuba and the Philippines, demonstrating bravery and commitment to nation alongside whites despite fighting in segregated units. In the First World War, more than one million African Americans responded to draft calls from the U.S. government, and more than 370,000 served in the U.S. Army.14 And while he later regretted the decision, W. E. B. Du Bois called for Blacks to âclose ranksâ and support President Woodrow Wilson in âthe Great War.â15 As the United States fought wars both overseas and at home under the banner of democratic ideals, Black Americans urged the nation, through sacrifice and loyalty, to vouchsafe the promise of life and liberty for every American.
A. Philip Randolph, a son of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and an emerging Black labor organizer, notably broke from Du Bois in condemning the First World War as a âshamâ and a âmockeryâ of American ideals. Writing with his co-editor Chandler Owen in their Harlem newspaper The Messenger in 1919, the two argued that âthe sham democracy about which Americans prateâ would be revealed as âa rape on decency and a travesty on common sense.â Owen and Randolph questioned the wisdom of Black Americans fighting in a segregated army for a Jim Crow society that lynched them with impunity.16 The two were well aware that Black Americans were expected to âaccommodate white expectationsâ under the threat of death, and African Americans were often killed as a matter of common practice with no consequences for their killers.17 As Richard Wright has written, Black Americans in this period âwere shot, hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they were either dead or their spirits broken,â a grim reality that led a generation of historians to characterize this early twentieth-century moment as the ânadirâ of Black life in America.18
The Black response to this routine violence was manifold. The Great Migration led to an exodus of nearly two million Black Americans out of the former Confederacy between 1915 and 1940.19 Many of those who stayed in the South moved from rural to urban areas, but whether in rural areas or urban, North or South, Black Americans committed themselves to developing their own institutions as segregation and violence hardened in the early twentieth century. Black banks, businesses, schools, and churches expanded dramatically before 1940 and provided critically important space for day-to-day life for Black people in America.20 These efforts at building Black institutions emerged as among the most important efforts at making freedom in the age of Jim Crow.
Efforts to formalize collective resistance to white supremacy and Jim Crow took a number of forms in the early twent...